Finally, the rest of the vacation pictures I promised last month!

Dig our fun fun visit to Ron’s in Coal Creek, an exciting photo gallery featuring mountain vistas, Joy & Ella, knitting, dogs, and snow!

 

Baby food. That’s what Brett calls Indian food, because so much of it is mashed up and tooth-soft.

I love Indian food. I have it for lunch sometimes, so Brett doesn’t have to eat it for dinner. (He and ginger have a problem with each other, and so many Indian dishes start with onions, garlic, and ginger. Poor pita redhead!) Today I walked over to India Cafe I and got myself some buffet take-out: dhal makhani, sag paneer, rice, some chickpea-potato-tomato-cilantro salad thing, and naan. Yum! I’m so happy.

I love Indian food for it’s vegetarianness and its rich spiciness, but most of all I love it for its dairy fat. There’s ghee in everything, and if not ghee there’s almost-too-much of some kind of oil. Or cream. It’s just plain wonderful. I wish I could eat Indian food more often.

Wait! I can! I live in Fairfield, Iowa!

I think I’ll start having India Cafe take-out every workday for the next couple of weeks. OH yeah.
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Monthly category archives in my blog now match the individual archives. This means that when you click on, say, April 2004, you no longer feel like you’ve been redirected to another site entirely because it’s all matchy-watchy. You like this very much. Trust me.

I also tweaked the style sheet for Iowa Chicks Knitting. Apparently this was done for CSS practice because in spite of all the time I spent doing it, it does not look better. Just different. *sigh*

 

Monthly category archives in my blog now match the individual archives. This means that when you click on, say, April 2004, you no longer feel like you’ve been redirected to another site entirely because it’s all matchy-watchy. You like this very much. Trust me.

I also tweaked the style sheet for Iowa Chicks Knitting. Apparently this was done for CSS practice because in spite of all the time I spent doing it, it does not look better. Just different. *sigh*
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As you know, I read voraciously. I don’t restrict myself to ebooks, but an awful lot of my reading is in e-format.

I started reading ebooks way back in the day – ten years ago, now – when I got my first palm-top computer. At that time, it was mostly Project Gutenberg stuff; books that were old enough to be in the public domain and could therefore be distributed freely. I read classics, mostly, because that’s what there was, and loaded up on reference material like the constitution, the bill of rights, and other items that might come in handy during a discussion in a bar somewhere.

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I highlighted my hair last night. I’d bought the box last week, but kept thinking of growing out bad haircolor and kept delaying. Then, after everyone else went to bed last night, as I was sitting knitting a scarf and watching Red Cap on BBC, I noticed that every female on the show had lovely highlights, and it occured to me that I could always go to a hairdresser for some low lights to help it grow out better.

So into the bathroom I went, after putting on an old shirt, and I busted into my box of Feria for brown hair and went for it.

It was cold in the house last night, so the product closest to my scalp (and therefore body heat) worked the best and the fastest. The stuff at the ends barely lightened my hair at all.

Additionally, I used the weird little product applicator brush thingy (it looks like a cross between a mutant toothbrush and a mutant hairbrush) and it basically left blobs everywhere. This is why I have a giant, weird-looking BLONDE!!! patch on my right temple.

The stuff’s supposed to stay on for 30 to 45 minutes, but after observing my remarkably mediocre application I figured it would be better just to wash it out. But first I needed to get the left side of my head (I’d started on the right) to lighten up a little, so I wrapped my head in a plastic bag and slapped a hot washcloth on the left to heat it up for a few minutes.

Then I got a towel and some shampoo and the conditioner that came with the kit and washed my hair in the sink.

As I’d blown my hair drier of twelve years up last Friday, I had to wait for it to air dry. Then I noticed that it was much blonder than I’d expected after only leaving it on for twenty minutes, that I’d actually not done too bad a job achieving the “chunky” look I was after (on the right side of my head, at least!), and that I liked the reddish-bronze color the highlighted sections had become.

All in all, not a terribly bad hair catastrophe! It’s obviously done-at-home-from-a-box, and it’s obvious I didn’t have the sense to have a girlfriend apply it for me, and it’s obvious that it was way too cold in my house to work properly, but in the final analysis I have some big fat chunks of lighter hair all over my head. If you don’t look too close it kinda turned out okay.

This is what I want to know: why can’t you buy bottles of the conditioner they put in hair color kits seperately? It’s the best, silkiest, most wonderfully effective conditioner in the world, but you can only get it in color kits. I think this is bizarre. Obviously they know how to make a super-conditioner, so why won’t the sell it? Even if you can only use it once a week or twice a month, people would still buy it because it rocks!

 

Check out my cousin Paul’s new place in Washington state. Pretty cute, huh?

He and Jen are expecting their first, a son, in November ’04.

 

St. Helens is erupting again. Take a look: Mount St. Helens VolcanoCam, Special Conditions and Current Update.

And then talk about it in the St. Helens’ thread on Rants!

 

omPrev2_wA2x.gifThe latest version of WisBar Advance is utterly fantastic. I’ve been running it for a few days (I even paid for it) and I really like it. It does everything the last version did, and it’s got a few new tricks as well including sounds and more buttons with pressed states.

I read the skinning FAQ today and updated my best skin ever: the skin previously known as Buddhanet… I haven’t even installed Dashboard on my e400 yet. I think it might be the end of an era, and I feel a little nostalgic. On the other hand, making Dashboard skins took all damn day, so it might not be an entirely bad era ending.

WA2 now lets the menu bar (the bottom bar on the screen) be skinned too and it looks awesome, check it out:

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“Use this simple java applet to compare colours quickly and easily. Excellent for designing web pages, as you can set the foreground and background colors to your tastes, and then read their hexadecimal values. You can contrast different sizes of text and/or a big colored area against the background colour.” Visit the Colour Numbers – Hexadecimal Color Value Calculator.